Romney on the rise

Key gains on convention’s eve

John Podhoretz

Hurricane permitting, the GOP convention kicks off Monday, and with it, the preliminaries are over and the general election begins in earnest. How stands the race?
At first glance, and even second and third glances, every indication is that we’re in for a nail-biter. The RealClearPolitics average, which aggregates all public polls, now has Barack Obama ahead nationally by a mere point.
The two tracking polls, which survey voters every day and collect data over each three-day period, have the race tied.
There’s reason to think Mitt Romney is in better condition than the national polls show.

Getty

A winning hand: Mitt Romney is in fine shape heading into next week’s GOP convention in Florida, where his support among seniors has boomed.

First, one has to consider the effect on Romney of the Obama campaign’s unprecedented barrage against him. Chicago spent an astounding $120 million over the summer, much of it on negative ads targeting Romney personally, and almost all of it in 12 battleground states. To give you a sense of how much spending that is, the McCain campaign in 2008 spent a mere $75 million in the general election against Obama in all 50 states.

Though Romney has certainly been bloodied a bit — we all know how he won’t release a lot of his tax returns — the polling from those states and nationally suggests he’s suffered mere flesh wounds. We won’t really know if the Obama campaign managed to cut deeply enough to cause a lingering infection until the general election campaign is in full swing.
But if the infection doesn’t materialize, that will mean the Obama campaign spent tens and tens of millions for nothing. On June 23, Obama was up in the RCP average by 2.4 points. Yesterday, two months later, 1 point. All that spending, and Romney’s position actually improved.
Nobody could argue that Romney has run a dazzling campaign. Indeed, he didn’t even try. Boston spent the summer husbanding its resources and accreting a massive amount of money to spend once he is formally the candidate of the GOP.
September will begin with Romney holding a gigantic financial advantage — and he will be using it closer to the election, when (assuming it’s well-conceived and useful) such spending will be far more effective than summer ads. Even more important for Romney was his vice-presidential pick. The selection of Paul Ryan has proved to be a spectacular success, and spectacular in unexpected ways.
First, and unpredictably, the pick strengthened Romney’s support among seniors. It was thought Ryan’s budgetary plans for Medicare would frighten seniors, but Romney spent a week hammering home that under his plan Medicare would not change for anyone over 55 — whereas Obama had already stripped $716 billion from Medicare to pay for other aspects of ObamaCare.
In Florida, to take the most potent example, Romney’s support among the elderly has boomed.
Then there’s the effect of the pick on Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. There has been a surge toward Romney since the Ryan pick, and the state is now generally considered a toss-up. On June 11, Obama was up by 4.4 points in the RCP average; as of today, that’s 1.4 points.
In a very close race, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes — votes that electoral-college fanatics playing with all kinds of scenarios to get Romney to the 270 he needs to win have consistently assigned to Obama — could be decisive.
Even more telling is what Wisconsin polls suggest about Obama’s standing nationwide. If things go badly for him in the fall, Wisconsin will have been the great harbinger, beginning in 2010.
Obama won the state by 14 points in 2008. In the midterm elections of 2010, Wisconsin was part of the great shellacking delivered to Obama and Democrats, as reformer Scott Walker took the governorship by 6 points.
When Walker sought to limit the power of the state’s unions, they ginned up a recall effort this year that cost Democrats months of effort and tens of millions of dollars — and lost when Walker got almost exactly the same percentage of votes he had in 2010.
Of course, Obama can change the momentum of the race, which seems to be moving in Romney’s favor with a brilliant performance from here on in and better economic data to buttress it.
But he hasn’t shown any political brilliance in a long time, and there’s not much evidence the economy is going to do him favors. (And if Democrats think one repugnant Senate candidate in Missouri is going to turn this around, they’re delusional.)
For his part, Romney can halt his own momentum. He’s done it before; he did it several times during the GOP primaries.
He is also poised for takeoff.